Changes

Option to set or change the e-mail address associated with your account.

Added a Privacy category in the settings, with a couple of new options related to following people and managing lists.

Nick autocompleter now shows user ID, too.

Proper links are made from URL’s found anywhere, when pasting plain text.

The “browse messages” option will appear in the drop-down menu that’s available in any avatar, that is, in the Meanwhile activities, in all the posts and in all the comments. There’s, sadly, a big catch: due to limitations in the information provided by the Pump API, you can only use this option with people in your same server. If you’re jessie@microca.st, you can only browse posts by people @microca.st, etc. The feature loses a lot of usefulness at the moment due to this limitation, but still, it can be very useful when available.

The option to change the e-mail address of the account will allow users of the identi.ca server to change their e-mail address, unchangeable since the migration from StatusNet, and users of other servers, to set an e-mail address for the first time. Depending on the server, this could bring e-mail notifications for activities, and allow for password recovery.

The new Privacy category in the settings (if you’ve never visited this dialog, you really should) has two options, to avoid sending follow/unfollow activities to your followers, and to avoid sending add/remove (from list) activities.

This basically means that if you enable these options, only the person being followed, unfollowed, added, or removed will know about it, and nobody else. Keep in mind, however, that letting your followers receive this information helps the network grow!

Besides privacy, enabling these options helps if you are about to start following or stop following a lot of people. This way you don’t flood your followers’ feeds with a lot of “Jessie followed JohnDoe”, and the like ;)

Not much to tell about the fourth item… since v1.3.0, when typing @ you get a list of users to mention. Now, if you have, say, 3 contacts named “Albert” (and nothing else), you can know who’s who by their ID’s. As a bonus, the new popup is better positioned and sized!

As for the last one, up until now, if you pasted a url-looking text, like http://something, a proper HTML link was created, and all was fine. But if you pasted, say, from a text file, something like “check out this cool link: http://pump.io “, nothing special happened and the link was not really a link, and not clickable. Now, something like the latter case will work, as long as what you’re pasting is plain text.

If what you’re pasting is rich text (say, from a web browser or a rich text editor), links should already be links, so that works as always ;)

Get it

Dianara is available in the repositories of several GNU/linux distributions. At this time, at least Debian 8 (Jessie) and newer, Mageia 4 and later, Chakra, Ubuntu 13.10 and later, KaosX and openSuse 13.2 and later. Hopefully they’ll have this release packaged soon, either in regular updates or in backports repositories. Thanks to all the great packagers who make this possible! ;)

Finally, the new release of Dianara, with quite a lot of enhancements!

Changes

The main change since v1.2.5 has been the refactoring of the way the timelines are handled, which makes updates much faster and the interface a lot smoother. The number of unread posts is not reset on each update anymore. If you get more new posts than what you have configured to show in one page, you’ll be notified of how many more posts are pending to be received in the next update. The posts opened from the Meanwhile feed via the “+” button will now be able to load the comments much more often.

Other smaller enhancements are a few new options in the Configuration dialog, such as the options to highlight comments made by you, or comments made by the author of a post and to choose the size of avatars, or more obvious “frames” for shared posts.

There’s also an option to hide duplicated posts; that is, posts which were already visible in the timeline will not be shown again when someone shares them.

One new feature that is not visible is nickname completion, a.k.a. “mentioning”. If you type ‘@‘ while composing a post, you’ll get a list of the people you follow. You can then type the first characters of a name and use the arrows and enter keys to select the contact you wish to mention. When creating a note, this will add that contact to the “To” list, which means they’ll get your post in their “direct messages” inbox. This was possible before, using the “To” and “Cc” menus, but now it’s simpler.

Get it

Dianara is available in the repositories of several GNU/linux distributions. At this time, at least Debian 8 (Jessie) and newer, Mageia 4 and later, Chakra, Ubuntu 13.10 and later, KaosX and openSuse 13.2 and later. Hopefully they’ll have this release packaged soon, either in regular updates or in backports repositories. Thanks to all the great packagers who make this possible! ;)

Now that some of the rough edges have been polished, it’s time for a beta.

The main change since v1.2.5 has been the refactoring of the way the timelines are handled, which makes updates much faster. Also, the annoying “timeline goes to top on update” effect is mostly gone, though the timeline still moves around when updates are received, this needs fixing. The number of unread posts is not reset on each update. If you get more new posts than what you have configured to show in one page, you’ll be notified of how many more posts are pending to be received. The posts opened from the Meanwhile feed via the “+” button will now be able to load the comments much more often.

Other smaller enhancements are a few new options in the Configuration dialog, such as the options to highlight comments made by you, or comments made by the author of a post and to choose the size of avatars, or more obvious “frames” for shared posts.

There’s also an option to hide duplicated posts; that is, posts which were already visible in the timeline will not be shown again when someone shares them.

One new feature that is not visible is nickname completion, a.k.a. “mentioning”. If you type ‘@‘ while composing a post, you’ll get a list of the people you follow. You can then type the first characters of a name and use the arrows and enter keys to select the contact you wish to mention. When creating a note, this will add that contact to the “To” list, which means they’ll get your post in their “direct messages” inbox. This was possible before, using the “To” and “Cc” menus, but now it’s simpler.

Hi! As planned, here’s a new release of Dianara for the end of the year.

Some of the main new features are the new Mentions and Actions feeds, which are basically the same as the Meanwhile feed, but with only activities addressed to you, and only activities done by you. Then, the expandable labels. Some of the information labels such as the “10 minutes ago” or “7 likes” in posts will expand when clicked, to show extra information. Some parts of that extra information was available previously in tooltips, but now that extra information might contain clickable links, too, such as user names.

Also, the way of showing when a post got to your timeline via sharing is clearer and more informative, and pasting a link that looks like it’s pointing to an image will ask if you wish to insert it as a regular link or as a visible image.

The main new features are the page selector, which you can use to jump to any page in your timeline (you can go to your first post directly, for instance), and the (optional) snippets in the Meanwhile feed. By default, snippets for the activities will be shown when the activity is highlighted, except if the activity is yours. This mostly means you’ll be able to see a part of a comment to one of your posts, or a comment matching one of your highlighting filters, for instance, directly on the side panel.

The most notable new features are font configuration, the option to send direct messages to people from the avatar menus, and the button to open ‘parent’ posts. You’ll see the ‘Parent’ button if a post in your timeline is actually a reply to something else. This can happen if someone shares a comment, for instance.